As much of an inconvenience it was to set up our new Starlink system in the winter has been, it looks like it was good timing. It looks like we’re all getting our OS updates, and with each of us having our own desktops, that would have done a number of our data limits!
My computer downloaded the update when I shut it down last night. When I started it up this morning, after doing my morning rounds, it spent the next while updating and restarting itself until it was done.
I did remember to get photos of the finished set up, this morning.
You can see where my brother ran the wire across, above where the old cables were. The one that’s hanging down was from the dish that was removed, which was the only one that had a connector. I’ll have to go back and tie it off so it doesn’t blow around in the wind, as soon as I can, until we can take it the rest of the way down.
Plus I’ll re-wrap the excess cable and make it tidier. My brother was a bit enthusiastic about making sure it was secure to the wall, so I’m not in any hurry to take out those screws! :-D Hopefully, I’ll be able to use the same screw holes when I put it back, because I sure don’t want to make more of them!
I did a speed test on my phone while I was at the burn barrel in the outer yard. Not too shabby!
This is my desktop, taken just this evening.
We have better signal in the outer yard than I have in my office! :-D
It’s still pretty darn good. Especially when I checked checked the outage log on the Starlink app. There were just three of them in the past 12 hours. Not sure what could obstruct it up on the roof like that. One, shortly before noon, shows the signal was obstructed for 10 seconds. The other two were just a minute apart. One was “no signal received” for 3 seconds, and the other was “network issue” for 13 seconds.
We never noticed any of these.
The app has a visibility check, showing any obstructions it is picking up from its current location – which is handy, since we have no way to get up there and do a check with a phone – and there are just the tiniest bits of red showing in a few places on the edges. Most of it is clear view, in all directions.
Since we got set up, my husband has tested its limits. There were some games he was curious about and downloaded them, tried them, then uninstalled most of them. There was one game he’d tried before, but it was unplayable. He’s now able to play it. Even my daughters, who play Star Wars in the evenings, have had a number of problems they were having simply disappear. For my older daughter, it’ll mean she’ll be better able to upload files, which will free her up to do more complicated, data heavier pieces, such as her animations and videos.
So far, we all are really, really happy with the improvements!
We were perfectly willing to wait until spring before setting our new Starlink dish up permanently on the roof, but my brother wasn’t. Not at all!
Of course, it turned out to be more difficult than even he expected.
One of the first things he wanted to do – while it was still relatively warm and the sun was bright – was seal the ridiculously large hole we had to make to fit the widest part through (I still don’t know what it’s called) with caulk. He even used his heat gun on it to cure the surface a little bit, before continuing. It’ll take longer to cure because of the cold, but at least tomorrow, we’re supposed to get above freezing.
Then one of the satellites was removed (except the part you can see on the roof), leaving the stand, which we were expecting to be able to use to hold the Starlink dish.
Well, it turned out to be much larger than the support post on the dish. My brother thought he could squeeze it to fit, but the metal turned out to be way too strong. He struggled for nearly an hour up there, using tools I’ve never seen before, before finally giving up. We would have to use the stand it came with. Which meant removing the existing tripod, first. We really didn’t want to make new holes in the roof, but there was no option available for us at the time.
Removing the original support required removing ice and snow.
The ice dam was about six inches deep in places, and he had to clear it all the way to the edge on one side, first to remove the coax cable that was already there – and affixed to the roof in a couple of places – then to be able to run the new cable across. Which also required moving the ladder.
This would have been a LOT easier in the summer!
My brother put most of the screws he took out, back into the roof after, to make sure there were no open holes for water to get in. In the summer, we’ll have to remember to fill them.
Once everything was clear, it didn’t take long at all to install it.
I didn’t get a good picture of the completed job, but once the stand was secure, the cable was run across the roof, then across the side of the house, before running down to where it enters the house. There was a huge amount of excess cable – it comes with 150 feet – which was quickly wrapped and secured to the wall. In the spring, I’ll take it down and redo it neatly, but for now, he just needed to get it up and tucked away, where it’s protected.
By the time he was done, it was starting to get dark, and he just dashed off home – but not until after he made sure the parts of the satellite dish were tucked away into the old basement! There is still one piece of the support attached to the roof, but there was no need to remove it, for now.
The unexpected thing is just how much the new dish is pointing north. Those tree branches are actually an obstruction! According to the app, we should expect signal interruption every 17 minutes. The app actually tracks that stuff. Looking at the log now, the last time we had an outage, it was because there was “no signal received”, and it lasted for only 2 seconds. It was happened more than 3 hours ago. In fact, looking at the log, the outages happened pretty much only during the time it was being physically moved around and frankly, I’m amazed there was any signal at all during some of those times. While my brother was working on trying to fit on the existing support, I had to pass the dish up to him several times. I had the base on the shelf against the sun room window, so I could safely put it down in between tests. Several times, the dish started to move, looking for a signal. This was almost right up against the house, and partly under the eaves. How it managed to get any signal at all amazes me. Especially considering the dish is facing North, and the house itself would have been obstructing the signal!
I do have to say some positive things about our Xplornet dishes. They are rock solid, they were installed very well, and we usually had decent speed on it. If we got enough signal strength for it. And that was the problem. We just kept losing our signal. Even when they had tech guys coming out, according to their equipment, we should have had a good clear signal, and they never did figure out why we weren’t. That doesn’t even take into account the problems we would have in high winds, or if there was bad weather to the south of us. The problem just kept getting worse and worse, too.
That will be the big test with this system. How does it hold out in bad weather? So far, we’re expecting things to get colder, the closer we get to Christmas, but there are no storms on the horizon, or even high winds. It might be a while before that test finally happens.
I am now writing this post while hooked into our Starlink internet.
Oh, my goodness, what a difference!
It was not without issues, though.
The first thing I had to do was some shovelling.
I had to use the ice chipper to break up the snow before I could shovel a path to the corner, where the current cables enter the house.
We had talked about pulling one of these out and drilling the hole better, but they are well sealed, plus on the inside of the house, not very accessible. We decided to make the new hole higher.
Using their app, I found a clear spot off the path to the kibble tray under the shrine and dug it out.
Which got immediately claimed.
Before drilling a hole, though, we needed to pick up some more sealant, so a quick run into town and a visit to the hardware store was in order.
That turned out to be… not quite what we needed.
Once we had the inside parts inside, we set the dish itself up, so we could fuss with the cables.
I am going to be much happier when this is on the roof!
Then the issues started. Drilling a hole through the wall.
A log wall.
We have a long set of drill bits that go up to half an inch, which is wide enough for the end of the cable. It’s too bad we couldn’t just use the coax that was already there, but it is what it is.
Except…
Just a few inches from the end of the new cable, there is a wider part. I don’t know the name of it, but it’s wider than half an inch. Still, we did create a half inch hole through the wall, almost 2 feet higher than the other cables. This was a pain, because my drill sucks and the chuck key is stripped. We still needed a larger hole, though, and that meant a trip to the basement, were I remembered a set of spade drill tips we found when cleaning the basement out.
We ended up having to drill a 7/8th inch hole, from both sides, because the spade tips were not long enough to go all the way through.
That is a large hole!!
We still couldn’t get the cable through. So for the next while, we used the long bit to try and smooth out whatever the wide part of the cable was getting caught on, somewhere in the middle. Having to drill the larger hole from both sides caused a “bend” in the hole, and the wider part of the cable, which is inflexible, was too long to get past.
Eventually, it got done, and the cable made it through. My daughter pulled through a few feet of slack, then set up the inside parts. As soon as the dish had power, it set itself.
I foresee a problem! :-D
It’s only temporary.
While still outside, I used the app on my phone to set up our account, then my daughter and I tucked away the extra cable, until we can set things up permenently.
By the time we were finished fighting with it, I completely forgot to take a photo of the hole. It looks so ridiculously big for the cable that’s running through it. We’re going to need to pick up some sort of spray foam to seal it properly. For now, it’s got some fibre fill shoved in, on the inside, to keep the wind out.
After using my phone to set up the Starlink, I went ahead and did a speed test.
Not too bad at all!
Now, download and upload speeds were not something we had much to complain about. Especially my husband. His computer is set up right next to the router, so he can plug a cable right in. He hasn’t been able to use WiFi since his Windows OS updated a while back. This is what he got.
Which is just insane!!! Wow!!!
The girls upstairs got hooked up and immediately noticed a difference, though I don’t think they’ve got speed test software on their machines.
Once I was settled in and hooked up, I went to a few places where I knew I would see a difference, if there was any. Images on Pinterest, for example, which loaded without issue, or Discord, which has always been a huge problem for me. It also connected almost immediately.
I didn’t have speed testing software on my desktop, so I downloaded some and did a test.
Before I show you the test results, however, keep in mind that I am in what’s probably the worst place in the house for WiFi, even with a booster.
Yes. My download speed was 0.16mbps. My upload speed was faster at .23mbps
Out of curiosity, I did another test on my phone, while sitting at my desktop.
Yeah, even my phone’s WiFi sucks in my office corner.
I tested my desktop again, after waiting a few minutes, and it did improve.
Then a few minutes later…
Yes. This is an improvement.
There was, however, a different problem.
Once we got this set up, my husband called our satellite provider and suspended both our internet accounts with them. We will test the Starlink for a couple of weeks before we cancel our old accounts. We won’t need to switch from one account to the other, part way through the month, and we no longer have data limits. It all comes down to how stable and reliable the connection is.
Then, because our old router was still pushing out signal, my husband unhooked the old satellite routers (that will need to be returned when/if we cancel) and turned off our router.
Suddenly, I no longer had a live feed to our garage security camera. The one that lets me keep an eye on the driveway and gate. Because the camera is so far from the house, we have a set up that hooks into our internet system via the electrical wires, and is then plugged into our router, which has something like six ports on it.
The router the Starlink system came with had only one port available.
We talked about it for a bit, then my husband went looking. He found a fix for his computer, and was able to start using his WiFi, and was able to hook our IP camera to the Starlink router. I now have a live feed again!
My husband’s computer, however, has gone down to 158.49 mbps download and 12.65 mbps upload. I just tested my phone. It’s at 52.6 for download and 9.2 for upload right now. My desktop is…
… 4.78 mbps download and 0.71 mbps for upload.
Excuse me while I don’t feel sorry for him. :-D
You know what I think I’m going to do?
I think I’m going to make some popcorn, go online and watch a full length movie or something. At highest resolution.
When we first signed up for it, we read that it would be sent by mail. After it was ready to be sent and fully paid for, my husband started getting notifications about FedEx delivery. Which was weird for our area, but whatever. It was due for delivery yesterday but, as I had mentioned in my posts, it never arrived.
This morning, my husband got an email telling him it was successfully delivered by FedEx
???
Well, it wasn’t delivered here, so we were really hoping it got dropped off at the general store the post office is in. This has happened before, when a delivery driver couldn’t find our place.
When I got to the post office, I asked about a package from FedEx, while getting the mail. There was a whole bunch of packages in and…
One of them was our Starlink system.
Yeah. It was sent by mail.
*sigh*
I ended up swinging past home to drop off the mail with my husband, who was waiting at the gate with the wagon, because there we no longer room in the car for my mother’s walker!
While I was at my mom’s, my husband checked it out, but we can’t set it up yet. We need to put a wire through the wall, but it’s possible we can use one of the existing holes for the co-ax running to the satellites. I’m pretty sure they’re weather sealed, though. We’ll have to dig our way to that part of the wall, first. We will most likely set it up in the middle of yard temporarily, until we can safely access the roof to install in permanently. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, my visit with my mother went rather well. I brought her the honey she asked me to get for her, and I did bring some pierogi that we made last night for her to try. When she asked what kind of filling they had and I told her, she made some comments about how she’d never used mushrooms before, but didn’t say anything negative, so that was a good start. We had lunch, then I helped her with her errands, then stayed for a bit of a visit after putting away her groceries. There were a few attempts by her to bring up her … hot topics, shall we say, but I managed to distract her from what usually devolves into racist rants. At one point, she started asking me if I wanted to be “healthy”, so I knew that was going to go weird. It turned out to go back to her visit here, to see the finished sign, then used wanting to see how nice the inside of the old outhouse looked as an excuse to get into things. One of those was fighting her walker through the back door of the garage to look for things she could criticize me about. It took a few weeks, but she finally brought up about the cans. We’ve been bagging our aluminum cans to eventually sell to a scrap dealer. We’ve got about 4 years of cans stored in a corner of the garage. Most of them are cat food cans, and sometimes critters tear the bags apart, so everything needs to be rebagged. My mother, of course, only saw the pop cans. Or what she assumed was pop cans. There are V8 cans in there, too. They’re the same cans she complained about, 3 years ago.
We don’t actually use cans all that much.
Anyhow, she has decided that these are all pop cans, and that means we drink nothing but soda, and that’s why I’m fat, and because I’m fat, that must mean I’m unhealthy. Never mind that she’s been fat for as long as I can remember, and aside from things like injuries or hernia surgery, I don’t remember her ever being sick. When I pointed out that most of those cans are cat food, she just gave me a condescending look, because of course I’m lying. Right?
I managed to distract her from that, though, and the conversation continued. At one point, grocery shopping came up, and I decided to take a chance. I told her about the quarter beef that we’ll be getting soon, how many pounds of meat we were getting, and some of the cuts. Now, this was part of a conversation about the cost of groceries, so buying 125 pounds of beef like this is saving money from having to buy in the store. So what did my mother get out of it?
She wants me to be healthy. She doesn’t want me to be sick and die. Because apparently, buying enough grass fed beef to last us for months is going to kill me? Apparently, I’m going to sit there and eat 125 pounds of beef, all at once? Or maybe it’s because she has been convinced that red meat is bad, even though we used to raise our own beef, butcher it and fill our freezers with it, for decades and never got sick? Whatever her reasoning, our buying a quarter beef is somehow supposed to kill me.
I have to admit. That’s a new one.
Still, overall, it was a good visit, and I was glad to see her stocking up on things, taking advantage of me being there with her car and able to carry them for her.
I’m glad to be home, though. These visits are very psychically draining! There’s just no way of knowing if something well suddenly trigger her.
As for the Starlink system, it’s already getting too dark, so we’ll have to work on that tomorrow. :-)
Oh, I am extra glad we don’t need to go anywhere, tomorrow!
The -21C is not too big of a deal.
The wind chill at -35C is a whole different story!!
That’s -6F with a wind chill of -31F, for those of you in the US.
On the plus side, tomorrow’s predicted high is now -17C/1F tomorrow, which is a few degrees warmer than previously forecast. Looks like the cold swept in faster than expected.
By Thursday, we are supposed to warm up to -1C/30F.
In my last post, I commented that it sounded like my daughter was finished cleaning the knobs that we found to fix the door to the old kitchen.
I was wrong.
She was down in the basement, using the buffer in my Dremel kit on the knobs!
She just took this project right over, and I’m happy she did. She did a much better job than I would have! :-D
This is how the knobs looked when I dragged them into the light.
Even as filthy as they were, they were still kinda pretty!
Oh, did they ever clean up good!
These two were out of the running. We were never able to get that screw out, and the bar was very wobbly. Also, there was no screw to fit the black knob.
We had these two bars to work with. They were both the same size as the damaged one, except for the length. These are shorter than the damaged one.
These are the knobs that came off the door, with crud and paint removed, revealing some of the copper.
These fit on the threaded bar, and had their own screws, but we didn’t want to use these again. Not when we had such pretty alternatives!
Aren’t these pretty? Uncovering the gold colour on the one was a very pleasant surprise.
These are threaded, so we could use them on the threaded bar. They are a bit smaller, though. Plus, we liked these ones, better.
We did not expect one of them to turn out to be brass! And that decorative one… wow, did my daughter do a great job cleaning that up! Especially where the paint had gotten right into the design. Their large sizes are more comfortable in the hand, too.
These fit on the non-threaded bar.
Sort of.
There was only one screw between them. Though we had screws from the other knobs, this one was longer, to fit into the holes in the bar, and the threads were different, too.
The screw went into the silver knob, which is where it came from originally. The bar fit very tightly into the brass knob, but without something running through the knob and into the bar, it could still get pulled off.
If we didn’t have a screw, we could still use a peg, right?
My daughter ended up using a piece of bamboo chopstick and trimmed it to fit. Then she installed the knobs into the door.
After hours spent scrubbing, cleaning and buffing, it took about a minute to install! :-D
The only problem is, the bar is too long. Even taking into account the different holes at each ind of the bar that would allow for some adjustment. With the original bar, the knobs could screw in as far as necessary to fit. The non-threaded bar isn’t that flexible. There are only so many holes that could be used to set the knobs.
Which means the whole thing gets pulled in and out while being used. The knobs actually fit into the openings in the plates perfectly, though.
Man, that door looks so battered and gross, now that it has these shiny, pretty knobs!
You can see the peg on this knob, left long to make it easy to remove, if necessary.
As we tested the door, there were still some problems opening and closing it that left us concerned that we’d be breaking the bar or something. This has long been an issue with the door, completely aside from the troubles with the knobs. It reminded me to take a closer look.
Sure enough, the top hinge plate was coming loose from the frame.
The hinge plate – and the screws – was painted over, of course.
*sigh*
My daughter was able to get it tightened, though, and that solved the problem. The door latches open and closed much more smoothly now.
Looking at the door while it was closed showed something very odd. I’d never looked closely before. I’d noticed the gap between door and frame at the top before; that’s easy enough to see. This is a very dark spot, so I used a flashlight to examine the rest of the door and frame and discovered that, by the middle, the door was flush against the frame. At the bottom, however, there was a very small gap that had opened up after the top hinge plate was tightened against the frame.
Normally, I would say that this was because of the house shifting, but the size of the gap at the top of the door, where it ends up snug against the frame in the middle, only to pen up again at the bottom, suggests to me that the door itself isn’t straight at that edge. Chances are pretty good it has been like this since the door was first hung!
Anyhow.
Now that the door is secured and the knobs replaced, we’ll just need to add something to keep the knobs from sliding back and forth as the door is used. I’m not sure what to use, yet. Need to think about what we’ve got, lying about!
I think, in the future, I’m going to be keeping an eye out for any other old doors lying around. If we’ve got another similar door in a shed somewhere, we might be able to salvage the parts and pieces and replace the current bar with a shorter one.
The important thing, though, is that it’s fixed. That means, when I go out to do my rounds in the morning, I won’t have to get someone to let me into the house when I’m done!
The delay we had as we prepared to take Tuxedo Mask to the vet requires a bit of background explanation.
For the past while, we have been going in and out of the house through the sun room. While I did a repair on the door of the main entry, where it was falling off its hinges, it didn’t last. The wood continued to split, and the door frame itself is splitting. Basically, we need to replace the entire door and frame set, which I hoped would have been done by now, but other things laid claim to our budget. We avoid using that door, so as not to damage it even worse. We do have another door in the dining room, but that one doesn’t have a key lock, and has troubles closing. Yeah, that door and frame needs to be replaced, too, but at least nothing is splitting apart. Anymore. The storm door on the outside was badly rotted at the bottom, and my brother repaired that before we moved in, sweetheart that he is.
Going outside through the sun room, however, means first going through a door to the old kitchen. That room isn’t heated and has little insulation, so we use it for storage and the chest freezer, and it’s a critter safe place to store our garbage bags until we can get to the dump. The cats are not allowed in there, but they sometimes slip through.
The good thing is, it is a buffer zone. The old kitchen goes out into the sun room. There is the original (?) wooden door on the inside, and a storm door on the sun room side. When the sun room was added on, the storm door stayed, and comes in quite handy.
The sun room acts as another buffer. There have been times where inside cats have made it as far as the sun room, or outside cats as far as the old kitchen, but not at the same time, thankfully! :-D
Then there are the sun room doors to outside; an inner door and a storm door, both salvaged. My late brother worked in demolitions, and most of the sun room was built with material he was able to salvage from who knows where!
It’s the old kitchen door that has been increasingly a problem.
From the inside, the knob worked only in one direction. If you turned the other direction, it would just spin in place. The door itself didn’t want to stay closed, and sometimes I would think I closed it behind me, only to come back later and discover cats milling around the old kitchen! Both knobs were also loose and rattled, but the outside knob (the old kitchen side) seemed to work better.
Until today. When it suddenly just didn’t.
While getting Tuxedo Mask into the cat carrier, my daughter needed to go back into the house, and couldn’t open the door. The knob just spun in place, doing nothing. My husband had to open the door from the inside to let us in!
Before we left, I quickly took a couple of photos of the door knob, with plans to go to the hardware store while my daughter took Tuxedo Mask to the vet.
Yes, this is a very, very old door. It’s the original, I believe, which would mean it’s been there since about the 1930’s. I don’t think that’s the original knob, though.
Once at the hardware store, I asked for help, so I could be sure I got the right kind of replacement knob. The first two staff weren’t sure, so they got the manager to help me.
He took one look at the photos and said, “no.”
He had no door knobs that would work. If we tried with a modern door knob, we’d have to drill a new hole.
That would mean removing the plates, of course.
You’ll notice how thoroughly painted over it is on this side. Even if I manged to get the screws out, getting it free of the door, without damaging it, would be difficult.
Of course, the other side is painted over, too.
He suggested that I try a second hand store. Sometimes, people donate their old door knobs.
Which is when I remembered finding door knobs when we cleaned out the new part basement. Some downright pretty ones, in fact.
Once we got home, got Tuxedo Mask set up in the sun room and my other daughter let us into the house, I headed straight for the basement. The knobs were easy to find, as I’d put them all in the same drawer.
Rifling through, I found three potential pairs of knobs. There was one more, but it was a more modern knob with its own plate that couldn’t work.
I started off by trying to clean them first. My younger daughter came along to help and, from the sounds of things as I write this, she finally finished. She was absolutely determined to clean all the recesses in that one more elaborate knob. A couple of them had paint on them, and all of them were incredibly filthy.
I’m going to have to take a photo of how they look after cleaning. They are gorgeous!!!
The screw on the white enamel one, however, is damaged and we can’t do anything with it, so that one’s not an option. My daughter worked out which two fit knobs together best while cleaning them.
After a while, I went to take off the old knobs.
*sigh*
One of these days, I’d like to get the paint off this door and refinish it. Maybe with a nice stain or something. It’s not a standard size door, so if we were to ever replace it, we’d be resizing the entire door frame. It’s in a log wall, so that’s probably not an option.
It took a while to get the knobs off, as the bar was deeply threaded into each of them.
Can you tell which one is the one I took off the door?
Yeah, the bottom one.
No wonder the knobs wouldn’t work right.
My daughter and I were just starting to clean the knobs I found in the basement when my mother phoned. Eventually, I mentioned to her what happened to the door. As I described it, she started telling me that I could get my brother to fix it. You know, the brother that lives an hour and a half away. :-/ I told her that we couldn’t do that. Then I had to explain – again – that we don’t use the main doors anymore, and why, so these doors are the ones we use all the time, now.
As I was adding in why we couldn’t use the dining room doors either, my mother started asking, why is everything breaking down all of a sudden? I told her it isn’t “all of a sudden.” These things were breaking down for many years. It’s just that nobody noticed it happening. Even my dad, while he was still living here, would no longer have seen a lot of it and, even if he did, was in no position to do anything about it. Now we’re here, and very active, so things that have been slowly breaking down over the years are finally just giving out.
Aren’t we the lucky ones? :-D
I think she even got it a bit, because she started talking about how she had relied so much on the boys taking care of things, she didn’t know anything about it all.
Which is a huge step forward from her usual, “you need a man in the house” lecture! :-D
So, hopefully, we’ll get the door working again tonight, or maybe tomorrow morning. The knobs have been scrubbed with vinegar and water and I want to make sure they are completely dry before we put the ones we’ve settled on, into the door. Once I got them off, I realized the knobs themselves are just fine. They even look a lot nicer, once the paint and scunge was removed! We much prefer the pretty ones, though. Hopefully, it’ll work.
If not, we’ll have to start digging through some of the sheds and the barn, and see if there are some really old doors we can steal the knobs from.
Not even a glorious sunrise quite makes up for having to be heading out so early, on icy roads.
But it was worth it.
I just spent the day at one of the nearby towns, and am proud to say that I have officially passed my non-restricted firearms safety course; an early Christmas present from my husband!
I just have to mail in the form to get my license, which might take a few weeks, or a few months, to get processed and mailed to me.
Once I get that, I can legally buy any hunting-type long rifle or shotgun.
Now, I learned how to shoot as a child, and a lot of the rules we have now didn’t exist back then. There wasn’t much I had to “unlearn”, though. With the written test, I only got one answer wrong, and it was a silly one. It was a true/false shotgun question, and I am only slightly more familiar with them than I am with a muzzle loader! :-D I’ll be getting a prize in the mail, though!
The practical part of the test had me handling weapon types I’d only ever seen in movies until today. Thankfully, being unfamiliar with a weapon did not generally result in lost points.
One thing I found interesting, particularly as someone who lives in the boonies; as long as we meet some pretty basic, common sense safety precautions, we’re pretty much wild west out here. Especially if there is a concern about wild animals in the area. While the list of restricted weapons and ammunition is longer here in Canada, and pretty stupid (some are banned basically because they look scary, and there’s even an air rifle that reaches only 350fps that’s banned. My crossbow does over 400fps!), thanks to the gun registry being rightfully thrown out, as long as we’ve got our license and keep it up to date, there are not a lot of restrictions.
Granted, we don’t have the budget to actually buy a rifle any time soon, but once I get the license, at least it will be an option. We also want the girls to take the course, too, though for the cost, it would be just one at a time. Which is fine. As long as I’m not the only one in the household with the license.
I am quite happy. It was worth it, and allows us to eventually get one more type of tool needed for living out here.
On a completely different note, today is the first Sunday of Advent, and while I was gone, the girls were kind enough to bring the bins of Christmas stuff up from the basement. Time to start some cat-proof decorating! :-D
Oh, and on another completely different note, and one that I was actually kind of expecting.
I got an email from our vandal’s lawyer, rather late on Friday, wanting to talk to me on the phone. Sure enough, our vandal did NOT agree to the conditions, so we do not have our Peace Bond against him. His lawyer will call me on Monday (tomorrow) to tell me what happened, and to talk next steps. I expect he will suggest mediation, which is where our vandal and I sit down with a third party, who tries to get us to work something out. Which I would be willing to do, if we were dealing with someone rational, but we’re dealing with someone who can’t accept responsibility for his actions, things everything is everyone else’s fault, and believes he’s entitled not only to what’s on the farm, but to have complete access to everything here, any time he wishes, as if we weren’t living here – except that I’m supposed to invite him in for tea after he verbally abuses me and vandalizes stuff. So I don’t see that mediation would be of any use. Which would mean going to trial, and the earliest court dates that are being booked are a year from now.
Well, we’ll see what happens when I talk to the lawyer on Monday.
*sigh*
At least as long as this drags through the courts, our vandal is behaving and leaving us alone, even if he does sometimes still phone my mother and leave nasty messages about how horrible we are. Ah, well. It is what it is. We just go along the best we can, while this drags on!
We used a house brand, cranberry raspberry cocktail for the base, which also contained other types of juice in it. The predominant flavour was actually apple.
The juice and ginger bug mixture stayed at room temperature in a plastic bottle for a week. Every day, we would give the bottle a squeeze to see if it was getting harder, which would show that fermentation was happening and gases were starting to expand. Then one morning, I walked past and saw the bottle looking like it was about to tip over! The bottle was rock hard, and the indented base had been pushed outwards under the pressure, causing it start tipping!
I immediately put it in the fridge to stop the fermentation process, but not before I opened the bottle enough to relieve some of the pressure!
When we taste tested it the next day, there was quite a bit of pressure release when I opened the jug, but in pouring it out, there was surprisingly little fizz. It’s more like a barely noticeable effervescence, with a light tingle on the tongue.
Honestly, it really just tastes like juice. None of us noticed much of a ginger flavour in there, and the predominant flavour is still apple. I found it very sweet, so when I had another glass the next day, I watered it down, about 50/50. I found it to be nicer that way.
In researching how to make this, one of the things I’d read was that, after moving it to the fridge, it needed to be drunk within a few weeks, because it loses its fizz. So far, that has not been true! Every time I’ve taken the bottle out, it’s been rock hard again, and there’s no lessening on the sound of gas being released when it’s opened!
As for the glass in the photo, I admit, this is an adulterated drink. I poured it over quite a bit of ice, rather than watering it down.
The ginger bug drink is very sweet, while the hard crab apple cider is a bit on the sour side, and the two balance each other out quite nicely.
I now have a new bottle of cranberry raspberry cocktail mixed with the ginger bug starter. That’s the last of the juice I got for this. I think next time, we’ll try making a fruit syrup out of what we’ve got in the freezer and see how that works out!
With our temperatures hovering around freezing, we’re getting things melting in some areas, and freezing in others.
Which leaves us with this, in front of the sun room. :-D
We have one of those extended pole shovels designed to remove snow from a roof while standing at ground level, and I used it to try and clear the heaviest snow where the two roof sections come together. Like an idiot, I didn’t take the ice pillar out, first. It fell against the window. Thankfully, the window didn’t break! These are dual pane windows, and the pane on the inside is already cracked, so if the outer pane got broken, we’d be in a pickle!
The other downspouts seem to be clear, but this is the only south facing one, so it gets the most temperature fluctuations, and it feels like it’s solid ice, all the way to the eaves! Trickles do make their way through, but that’s about it.
While doing my rounds, I tried to see if we’d lost any more trees in the spruce grove. I didn’t see any newly fallen trees, but it looks like one of them – a live one, not one of the dead ones – lost about 15 feet off the top. It’s in an area that’s hard to get to even in the summer. With this much snow on the ground, it’s completely inaccessible right now.
Not so much the other piece of tree I discovered on the ground.
I was able to make my way over to the broken canopy tent. From a distance, I could see movement under it, showing that that cats are still able to use it for shelter, so it’s going to stay for the winter. This piece of tree looks like it landed on the corner of the tent and broke it even more. I can’t check on the BBQ under it. At this end, it has a shelf with a handle. There are S hooks on the handle for BBQ tools, and you can see one of them on the ground. Hopefully, it just got knocked about, and not damaged.
This is where it fell from. If I remember correctly, this was not a dead part of the tree, either. This is a group of three very large maples, and they do have a lot of dead sections that we would have to hire someone to safely remove.
Eventually, we will clear a path to the nearby fire pit and might be able to, at most, cut up and clear it away the broken piece or, at least, just move it aside so we can access the area.
There are still quite a few areas we can’t get at, with some we won’t even try to until the snow is gone, but in those that I can actually see, the broken branches we found before, plus what I saw today, are the extent of the storm damage. With all the dead branches we’ve been cleaning up these past four years, there are very few smaller branches on the ground that we’ll clean up when the snow it gone, but that seems to be leaving the really big things to fall!
The Re-Farmer 